“I won’t know everything about myself until I fully understand things when I write to you”

I am happy to start promoting your new novel, April or never (Seix Barral), which was born, our story, “raise a little more than the accident that Marta [Jiménez Serrano] and we live: wonder what would have happened if this absurd carelessness had taken a man’s life. I’ve had it for a while now Martha how I flirted with the idea of ​​writing about the experience of the accident, but at a certain point I realized that it was a story that was more in line with his narrative herramientas than mine.”

Please. It is inevitable when you read this novel recorded in the previous book, Map of the sunoverview of the epidemic of the twentieth century.

Response. Daniel, the main character April or neveryou could be the perfect person Map of the sun. An integral part of this community of solitaires who feel disconnected from the world they ride and are desperate to reconnect with others.

P. While this is obviously not an autobiographical story, what made you love your protagonist so much?

R. I gave you all the trivial details like the brand of tobacco you smoke or the video game you play, as well as some more cross-cutting questions like the difficulty of living in the present. Well, Daniel and I are very different. Unfortunately. If we seem disappointed, we will not be able to understand my character as well as I feel, because weor you have nothing so difficult as to understand each other.

P. How did the idea of ​​translating the drama of what Sergio del Molino calls “huerfilos” come about?

R. I never thought I would be writing about authorship. Even less about the duel of a father who kills his daughter. What brought me to this question was not so much thematic interest as narrative requirement: my character needs to go through a limited experience to explore what happens in our perception of time during a fight. For one thing, it soon became clear to you that Daniel’s trauma had to do with a little girl who had grown tired of being on his side.

P. Of all the problems that plagued Daniel until he was less aware (the crisis of the 1940s, guilt, the impossibility of dreaming, the paralyzing struggle), what most conditions his development in the novel?

R. I believe that is exactly the problem you are asking about: you are not aware of the greatest tragedy. Huy de and complejo de culpaWithout fully understanding it, you go through periods of depression or emotional paralysis without knowing where it comes from. I think many people and actually many different people have similar experiences. We are discouraged from expressing our emotionsand when we need to do it, we watch silently.

P. One of the story’s key characters, John1419, calls the shots between reality and fiction (“I wonder what’s more real, the days you dream or the days you live”). Are you sure who will answer?

R. Lacan said that a king who eats several hours a day is a beggar and will not be different from a beggar who eats several hours a day is a king. It is a good and partially certain sentence. It may be that they—the king, the beggar—see no difference in their conscience or in their spirit: but their bodies are very different.

»One would eat well and enjoy good health, while the other would sometimes die of malnutrition before reaching adulthood. Oh yeah, that’s the problem for good things that are certain words, physical reality always prevailsfrom here.

P. And as a storyteller, what is the formula for passing these queues, as you know in it Map of the sun and does it happen here too?

R. Always based on reality so that I can play with it, introduce fictional or even fantastical elements. But the goal is always the same: to implement fiction as a strategy to better understand reality.

P. Do you have a common mysticism, writing and traveling at the same time?

R. Hence: at least when I think about travel in my novel at that time. Porque en April or never You have no sophisticated machines to travel to the past, no complete theories of physics. We travel through time in our head, as ready as we are to forget our memories and return to our psychological experience of a particular day and hour. Y para ello we must overcome this state of desapego and self-abandonment that mysticism – which is also writing – follows.

P. Why does Daniel think his desire should care about him?

R. Why? our desire manifests itself in the present. This happens with the mystic who seeks union with the divine: if he continues to be interested in worldly things, it means that he is unable to reach the right state for this union. And it’s also happening with time travel in my new life: if you continue to think what you know in 2025, how can you be confident that you will still be in 2024?

“AI ​​can create real works of art. It can reproduce patterns, but it cannot generate new patterns.”

P. What do you think about AI? Like the author, you have concerns, do you think you might find this helpful?

R. I have to decide that artificial intelligence seems very useful to meincluding for creative work. I am sure that the machine will never be able to create true works of art – that is, it will be able to reproduce patterns but not generate new patterns -. But it can serve to support the artist’s work, whether by providing documentation or creating a dialogue suggesting that we should think better.

»What may concern me is that the introduction of artificial intelligence into our lives is not very different from that which lived in industrialization: Machines intended for our work, which paradoxically lengthened working hours and made working conditions difficult.

P. To paraphrase, who is Juan Gómez Bárcena when he is not writing?

R. Someone who never knows the whole thing, because I’m used to fully understanding things only when I write them.

P. At some point you can travel, when will your life change?

R. No. I have made many mistakes, but I am sure that removing them would doom me to more significant mistakes. On the other hand, I am happy with who I am now. To change critical moments in my life would be to lose myself. Would Juan be better? Sometimes. But I cannot prefer her to Juan que soy.

“I have made many mistakes, but I believe that removing them would doom me to more significant mistakes.”

P. how do you write

R. I was filled with the idea of ​​history, that is, to write a book in which the story of the past will appear, which we have certainly changed. For example, I wonder if Jesus was killed on the cross or if Hannibal Barca was born in the Second Punic War.

P. Of course, after writing this novel, is it clear to you that this is the time and how many types there are? Because in the book he talks about clock time, things he doesn’t move, limits, relationships…

R. San Agustín said something that has always pleased me: that we all believe that time is a thing that we can define if we try. Until one day we discover that we have no idea what is going on outside where we live. Even on a physical level, through the theory of relativity, time has transformed into something that escapes our ordinary sense.

»I am not so much interested in understanding time itself—it was absolutely what was in my mind as an embryonic understanding—as in understanding the various forms in which we can experience it. As far as complete cultures are concerned, time is not a fleeting moment that goes forward in a circle that, for example, always returns to the same time. Or how For a person who engages in a duel, time seems to stopjust as it happens to Daniel.

P. How and when did I learn that “the experiences of others do not prepare us for life, at least our own”, and that “the world and all its beauty is also very fragile”?

R. I will say that it is an experience that has passed through my entire life. One can learn from history books, wisdom advice and psychologists’ offices: unfortunately, no one can deny that we are always without mistakes, neither as individuals nor as societies. This is to be alive: to know that For the cautious people that we are, life is about to come through every emotion in its entirety and intensitybez ahorrarnos nada.

“Extreme parties try to emphasize the solidarity of the disaffected masses in order to make them more manageable”

P. Current action in Benidorm, an excellent example of real estate development and construction. Are we losing the battle to protect the identity of communities and cities against urban sprawl, gentrification and farmers’ prices?

R. Don’t worry about it, but don’t make a big deal out of it. Even the owner who decides to charge the price of his alquiler knows that he will always have someone willing to pay it. It is understandable that both large entrepreneurs and owners seek the greatest profit from their inversions: it is the logic of capital.

“But anyway, It is the duty of the government to enforce strict laws To prevent you from saying logic that is meant for cash flows and not for people, it works in all its brutality. In summary, I believe that the government should strictly limit the price of alquiler.

P. Should you be taking steps to deal with the growing insecurity that plagues the youth and not so young?

R. In addition to freezing the price of alquilers and a definitive ban on tourist housing, we propose a new autonomous law that will make the payload more flexible in the jaws function. I admit that these proposals seem commonplace to me and I am not sure why they are not implemented in the end, even though a number of parties have included semi-substantive proposals in their programs. I suspect that in practice there are economic forces that prevent application.

“We are facing a crisis in the Western world”

P. How is it possible that extreme populism like Vox is gaining ground in a part of the country and in Europe?

R. I think what we are facing is an authentic crisis of Western consciousness. After the discovery, of course, nothing surprising The United States will soon become the world’s first superpower and Europe must face limitations on its expectations of political and economic influence in the world.

»Far-left parties are gaining the voice of those sectors most affected by this crisis: including, as analyzed in Map of the sunIf you’re trying to emphasize the solidarity of this group of disaffected, the more disaffected they are, the easier it is to manipulate them.